How it works:

Congratulations and welcome to the Balloonists' Wind Forecast Beta Test. You have been invited to view the site before it makes it's official debut because of your continuing support and feedback.

Now I must ask you for a little more; use this site, abuse it, test it, break it -- and send me feedback about what you think or what broke for you (so I can fix it.. maybe).

While you're trying to break my code, also think about any missing features that you would like to see. If there's any feature that seems useless or unnecessary, let me know that too and I can streamline the site.

When you're done reading the tidbits on this page, you can try out the site at: http://beta.ryancarlton.com/wind.php or by clicking on the snazzy "Try it out!" graphic to the right.

Things to watch out for:

Internet Explorer - The bane of any web developer, older versions of Internet Explorer are improperly rendering my site. While I work on the hacks to make them render properly, do me a favor and upgrade to a better browser: Google Chrome Mozilla Firefox

Printing - I'm still working on making printed versions of the site look right -- so bear with me on that for a while.

No Data - In some locations, like Albuquerque, the raw data I receive has a lot of missing data lines. When this happens, you will see "NO DATA" on the screen. I'm still trying to come up with a more elegant method to deal with this problem.

Slow Loading - The page is slow. You'll notice that pretty quick. I'm looking for ways to speed up the loading process.

Missing Airports - The NOAA site does not allow access to all airports/locations. I have an idea on how to handle that (give you the nearest working airport) but that code still needs to be hammered out.

How to contact me:

Email - You can email me at ryan@ryancarlton.com, I check it regularly throughout the day. Please use "BETA" at the beginning of your subject line so that I can filter out your emails faster. That would help a ton!

Phone - If you have a really cool idea, or something breaks really bad, feel free to call me/text me at 217-474-7789.

Twitter - If you're hip enough to follow twitter, you can catch progress blurbs and frustrated keystrokes of an overworked programmer by following rxcarlton on twitter. This is a new account made just for RyanCarlton.com content.